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Recaps

I’m still having a difficult time understanding this final conflict between the former yakuza and the pirate-like group. I’m not sure it even matters at this point. What is important is stopping the giant robot and getting the cores back so Chiaya can go home. What follows is absolute chaos incarnate, and not in a good way.
Unfortunately, it looks like the budget, or time, ran out for this final episode. At many points during the final fight, especially during the first half of the episode, there are a lot of tricks to disguise the lack of animation. Sometimes it’s a missing set of mouth flaps and other times it’s action happening off screen. It’s absolutely terrible and glaring obvious considering the quality of what came before. I can only hope these issues are ironed out on the eventual disc release.
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We return to the frantic duel between Momo and the demon queen. I have to say she doesn’t look much like a demon. Momo’s mother steps in to stop her, and that’s when we discover that Momo’s real mother is the demon woman she is fighting. Chi and Ai arrive at the same time and get to watch as Momo is taken out of the battle.
Chi immediately sees the connection between Momo’s relationship with her mother and herself. (Nevermind the fact that there’s a clear Momotaro reference here.) Chi learned from Momiyama that her mother wasn’t her biological mother, and that’s why she was trying to get her back home.
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Masami and Shigyo hear directly from the president about her and Chiaya’s secret past. They are space aliens who landed centuries ago and have been waiting for the super-super moon alignment so they can return to their home world! She needs Ma-chan and Shigyo to retrieve her daughter and get back the octopots and cores! Have I mentioned this show is silly? This show is silly.
Ai has found herself in Okayama, caught by the family who owned the peach orchard that she was helping herself to in the last episode. Little miss freeloader seems to have met her match in a mother daughter team who want her to pay back what she ate with labor. There is some trouble with the local tax collectors too, but this part of the plot seems secondary to the trouble brewing elsewhere. This show has been fast paced during normal episodes, tackling two separate locations at once is taxing to my strained attention span. This is where having a simuldub actually helps me catch bits I missed. It’s far easier to follow this in my native language.
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It wouldn’t be an anime without a beach episode, would it? Yes, this episode opens with the girls stopping for a day at the beach on their way to their next destination. We had hot springs two episodes ago and the beach now. Then again, I don’t think I’d be able to pass up a day at the beach either if I were them. It’s a nice excuse for more beautiful watercolor backgrounds.
Nozomi is starting to loose patience with her motley group of friends. There is just one letter left, one stop left on their trip to reply to the requests for Maccha Green’s assistance. The letter this week takes them to Hiroshima and the land of okonomiyaki and yakuza. However it looks like pirates are the bigger problem here.
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The evil Takumi group is at it again, why do they keep blowing everything up?
The girls reconvene after the kidnapping last week, and Ai is eager to get her hands on a stone for her assistance. Treated to snacks instead by Misa they head off for a maiko makeover and go out for a walk around town (loosing Yukina in the process, of course.) What exactly does Shuten want though? Everyone seems to want to know what his motivation is to interrupt the concert.
The ongoing mystery of the stones reveals that Chiaya’s mother needs to get as many as possible before the full moon. Is Chiaya going to turn into a weresquid permanently or something if her mom doesn’t do something before then?
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Welcome to Kyoto! Land of Rock and Geishas… or at least that’s what the city has embraced since the calamity which changed the world. A land where magical stones literally fall from the sky like rain during concerts. Before we can arrive in Kyoto we get a quick side trip to the hot springs for the Rolling Girls, where Nozomi tries to lay some ground work to keep her tangled pack from screwing up. Nozomi is the first to realize that her mission to help out Maccha Green isn’t going exactly as well as she hoped.
Upon reaching Kyoto the girls answer the latest request for assistance, and are immediately mistaken for Bests by the Kamogawa Rockers. Before Nozomi can correct the case of mistaken identity it’s off to a rock concert! The leader of the Rockers is a girl named Misa Ichijo, and she puts on a mean show. Or would have if a boy named Doji Shuten didn’t show up and kidnap her right off the stage. It’s another battle of the Bests with all of the explosions and absurdity that comes along with it, and it’s perhaps the flashiest we’ve seen since the opening episodes.
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Six episodes in to The Rolling Girls and a pattern has emerged with who owns magical stones and why they eventually give them up. Each Best was once was gifted the stones by the strength of their convictions. When they loose these convictions conflict rears, and they’ve been willingly giving up the stones that were once the representation of their strength of heart made manifest.
Himeko and Tomoki used to have those dreams. They both had moonlight stones and the desire and drive, for himeko it was to create and for Tomoki it was to race. Over time both lost that inspiration, and their reunion is beginning to kindle a different sort of desire between them. The bad blood between Mie and Aichi doesn’t extend to the unofficial Bests of both groups. They have no desire for conflict… their supporters on the other hand do.
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Next stop for the Rolling Girls is the city of Nagoya. I’m guessing the lightning strike in the end credits of the last episode was just a gag after all, but the girls did run into a mini-crisis of running out of gas. Pushing their bikes along the road they make it to the city only to meet with a very familiar customs agent. Yup, it’s a running gag that the border crossing agent is always the same lady à la Nurse Joy.
Trouble is afoot in Nagoya though. The city has become a haven for motorcycle races, and a big grand prix is coming up. However, just before the girls arrive someone or something causes all of the shachihoko (mythological tiger-headed fish) gracing the rooftops to explode. Including the gold ones that sat on the top of Nagoya castle. (Note: the US bombed that castle up in WWII, so this isn’t the first time those fish were destroyed.)
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The Rolling Girls are on the run! After being arrested as potential terrorists in the last episode, and not finding the missing moonlight stone to clear their name, it’s time to make a break for it! They discover their impounded rides are in danger of being repainted and use as communal rental bikes in the city. We find out that Yukina is actually a talented artist who was rescued once by the Noriko of the paint shop, and her enthusiastic mother. (Noriko was poking around last episode in the background.) The women explain some of the rules of Tokyo, or as it’s being called now ‘Always Comima.’
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Nozomi finds herself in the company of strangers, and boy are they strange. As Nozomi looks at her accidental crew she starts to wonder exactly what their deal is, they all seem a bit flakey. The gasmasked Chiaya speaks in stilted sentences and seems fixated on gathering moonlight stones. The stones seem to have something to do with Bests, and fall out of the sky. No one seems to know much else about them. So Nozomi decides to go along with the strange girl’s plan, and Yukina says she saw moonlight stones in Tokyo so the group heads for the border.
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